Free Blue Plate Special by Kate Christensen Page A

straight and tall and assert themselves to their mother in a loud voice if they had to. Then she told them to come back to her window if it didn’t work out. It did. Beverly was at school, as always, the next day.
    Soon after that, a strange man came to the door and threatened my mother, pointing a gun at her. He was the father of a shy, scared, troubled little girl who’d come over to play at our house only once, one of Susan’s classmates. He was sure my mother was hiding her. Somehow she convinced him that hisdaughter wasn’t in our house and got him to back down and go away.
    Despite these incidents, though, things seemed to be okay on the surface. When Halloween came, I made my costume out of a cardboard box: I drew a screen on it with squiggly static lines, made antennae out of coat hangers, and wore it on my head with little eye holes, dressed all in black so I looked (I hoped) like a TV on a stand. As usual, the enormous bags of candy we lugged home were confiscated by our mother and doled out to us so slowly they would last till Christmas, and would have lasted even longer if she hadn’t ransacked the stash at night while she was studying.
    Then one November night, after we kids were all in bed, my father called and told my mother he was in Tempe and would be stopping by soon to take us with him for the weekend.
    “The girls are already asleep,” she told him. “You can’t show up out of the blue like this. They all have things to do tomorrow.”
    “I’m coming over,” he said. “Get them ready, I’m taking them.”
    My mother woke us up and drove us to our friends Mike and Jayne’s house, where we all spent the night. We went home the next morning and resumed our lives. Before lunch, our father arrived. The front door was open, but the screen door was still locked. He yanked it open and leaped at my mother and beat her more savagely than he had ever beaten her before, yanking her hair out and punching her breasts. Susan and Emily hit his legs and tried to defend her while I hovered in the doorway to the kitchen, paralyzed with shock and fear.
    “Dial zero, Laurie,” my mother said to me, gasping a little. “Tell them to send the cops.”
    I reached up to unhook the receiver from the wall phone, dialed one long, slow zero, and said I know not what to theoperator when she answered. I must have given her the correct information, because minutes later, a cop car arrived in a blaze of sirens. The cops, our saviors now instead of the pigs, came into the house, pulled my father off my mother, and led him away in handcuffs. We all stood in the driveway together and watched him get shoved into the back of the squad car, watched it drive away.
    Then we all went back inside. My mother sat at the table, crying, pulling out hunks of her own hair while the three of us comforted her, patting and hugging her, telling her we loved her. The next day, her breasts were completely black and blue. Over the next week or two, the bruises faded. Her hair grew back.
    My mother had declined to press charges, so my father was probably released soon after the cops took him away. We received no further child-support checks from him. He disappeared from our lives.
    For months afterward, I kept my father’s expired driver’s license under my pillow; he had given it to me the summer before. The photo showed an old hippie with a long salt-and-pepper ponytail and shaggy beard, his eyes wild, probably from drugs. He bore little resemblance to the father I’d blindly adored as a small kid.

CHAPTER 13
Jim
    We had a lot of cats growing up, but I only ever cared about one of them, a handsome, good-natured little tabby called Toby who slept on the pillow by my head and whom I loved to cuddle and play with. He disappeared shortly after my father did. A neighbor found him in his air conditioner, dead. We guessed that he’d gotten stuck and died of thirst. How the neighbor didn’t hear him mewing before he died, I could not imagine. It